Surely you mean driven by closed-loop servos with encoders, don't you? Jacques Mattheij wrote a long post about how he ended up having to replace all the CNC machines he sold that used stepper motors because he didn't know any better at the time, and brushless motors are a lot faster and more powerful as well as not losing steps.

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michaelt 2 days ago | parent [-]

I guess "mid price" isn't the most helpful term when machines vary from $100 to $100,000 huh?

I think the X-Carve 3-axis wood carver uses stepper motors with belts of all things. The Shapeoko Pro is leadscrews and stepper motors. Wazers, I believe, are belt-and-servo driven. And a lot of 'CNC conversion kits' you can order online use stepper motors. Plus of course laser cutters have really low torque requirements, so they've got a lot of design freedom.

Arguably those are "cheap" rather than "mid price" it just felt weird to declare a $4000 machine to be "cheap"

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WillAdams 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Actually, it was the Shapeoko 1 which introduces the idea of belts (MXL), then switching to Gates GT2 belts with the SO2 (ob. discl., I got a free machine for doing the instructions, see Github). Since it was opensource, the X-Carve was forked from the SO2, though the X-Carve Pro was a completely new design.

Note that belts were continued through the Shapeoko 3 (I got a machine as a "thank you"), though the Z-axis got a leadscrew in the Z-Plus upgrade, then the Pro (since, I got a job with the company and got an XXL as part of my employment), then the 4 (the original Pro is referred to as a 4 Pro sometimes), and it is only with the 5 pro that ball screws were switched to for all axes (and I now have a 5 Pro).

For an example of what a belt-drive CNC can do see:

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/hardcore-aluminum-milling-...

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kragen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think there are CNC machines that cost 100 times more than US$100k.

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regularfry 2 days ago | parent [-]

Some products should be compared on a log scale. CNC machines are a very good example.

	▲	kragen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The middle of a log scale from US$100 to US$10M would be US$30k.